[hpoj-devel] Forking of ptal-printd

[Timothy L. <ti...@wo...>]

David Paschal wrote:

> Would it make more sense to fork or not fork by default
> (changeable by a command-line option)?
>

Umm...  if you intend ptal-printd to be run by regular users, default to
*not* fork.  Saves typing an extra flag.  ;-)

Add an option like -daemon to enable forking of child process, I
suppose.

David Paschal wrote:

> Part of the problem was that it wasn't immediately obvious what the most
> appropriate recovery was for each of the possible errors.  I suppose it's
> OK to exit if an error occurs during startup, for example, failure to create
> the pipe.
>

Yes, I think you can exit upon failing to create the pipe.  As for the
other run-time conditions you mentioned, here are my suggestions:

   * Failure to open the pipe / failure on select () ---- Just discard
     the data
   * Failure to open peripheral ---- can ieee12844pp.o force ieee12844.o
     to re-scan for new peripherals???  If not, I'd say discard the data
   * Failure to write data to the peripheral ---- maybe a retry
     threshold, after which data are discarded?

One more thing, about the ieee12844.c and ieee12844pp.c:  the static
variable *debug* should be initialized to 0.  Most end-users probably
don't want to see messages popping up on their consoles.....  <grin>


     Timothy